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In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

It’s an epitaph (short text honouring a deceased person)
Mirrors the structure of a Petrachen Sonnet, but the poem is longer
End of stanza one: almost a cyclical structure, starts with youth, then reaches maturity,
then reflects on youth

CONTEXT

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Written 1927 after both women had died (sisters)
Eva lived 1870-1926
Con lived 1868-1927
Constance was first woman to get elected in parliament: Yeats was fascinated by women
who broke conventions, a patriarchal attitude to women + women who break the mould
Lissadell was a neo-classical Georgian house, he met the girls there in 1894, he was
attracted to the gracious living of the gentry
Yeats thought the family had neglected its aristocratic duty to work with the peasants, he
goes back to confine the women in the house in the poem, the Victorian idea of the
idealised family affects Yeats

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THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Beauty/Age

Politics

Aristocracy/Wealth

‘Beautiful, one a gazelle’
- ‘Gazelle’ metaphor
for elegance of Eva
‘But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the
summer’s wreath
...
’
- Yeats referring to Con’s
participation in the Easter rising
1916
- Adds to the irrelevance of her
ways by calling them ‘younger
dreams’ suggesting she was
young and foolish
- He thinks she dreamed of
‘Utopia’ = unachievable state
- ‘Skeleton-gaunt’ suggests
politics tainted her, fervour can
corrupt beauty
‘Arise and bid me strike a match And
strike another till time catch;’
- Extendedmetaphor
- Striking a match is a resistance
almost to the darkness around
you, to the corruption of
politics etc
- Reference to the ideas which
strike you when your
imagination lights up

‘The light of evening,
Lissadell’
- Starts with a
house, house
was a symbol of
the old
aristocracy
‘Two girls in silk
kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle’
- Yeats relates
the sisters to
Asian/African
themes to show
how they do
not ‘fit in’ to
their
aristocratic
lives: ‘silk
kimonos’ and
‘one a gazelle’
illustrate this
point
- Silk reflects
their wealth

the afterlife Yeats
imagines is not
necessarily rooted
in any particular
theological
doctrine
‘Dear Shadows’
taken from
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
‘Now you know it
all’ suggests that
they didn’t know
everything before
they died, but now
– in death – they
can have the
ultimate,
omnipotent,
knowledge

‘Should the conflagration climb’
- Fire can be destructive, a sign of
revolutionary action
‘All the folly of a fight’
- Another reference to politics
shows the madness of what
they are doing
- The childishness is emphasized
by rhyming ‘fight’ and ‘right’
together, by showing the
immaturity of the poem’s
structure
‘We the great gazebo built’
- The comparison of a ‘gazebo’
attached to a house shows the
way that Ireland is attached to
Great Britain
- Makes the arrangement seem
temporary, and weak
- Can also show them making a
fool of themselves, as ‘gazebo’
means to make a fool of oneself
in colloquial Hiberno-English

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